The present invention relates to a device and a method for sterilizing products with hot water and/or hot steam.
The terminal sterilization, in particular hot water spraying, is generally carried out on a relatively large scale, for example with volumes of over 5 m3, in order to be able to sterilize a quantity of products per run which is as large as possible. The run time can be influenced by means of the quantity of available media, the size of the heat exchangers and the obtainable temperature of the heating or cooling media. The design of these components is in turn not only dependent on the loading density, the product and the required process time but also on the size and mass of the sterilizer which has to be consecutively heated or cooled. A very large energy consumption is associated with the continuous cooling and heating of the sterilizing device.